Why ports matter to Canadian horticulture

Karen Davidson

For British Columbia cherry growers, global trade is so important that the Asian Moon Festival is on their calendars. This year’s September 29th date in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore is the equivalent of Canadian Thanksgiving – a mid-autumn festival that revolves around feasts shared with family and friends. That’s precisely the peak of market timing for late-maturing varieties of B.C. cherries.

“The Asian market is very important to us,” says Richard Isaacs, commercial director, Global Fruit, B.C. “We ship to 30 countries around the world, with much of our volume either shipping out of the Port of Vancouver or flying out of the airport. Where possible we like to ship by ocean freight to arrive later in the seasonal markets, giving our customers an extended cherry selling campaign and improving returns to our growers. The temperature is also maintained much better throughout the supply chain when we use ocean containers compared to air freight, which is critical for the quality of the fruit.”

During the COVID pandemic, the 2021 and 2022 seasons were challenging as supply chains broke down with reefer containers out of position, boats congested at ports and scant equipment and labour available for unloading. Transit time from the Port of Vancouver to Shanghai, for instance, could be more than four weeks with delays in unloading.

As a result, Global Fruit sent fewer cherries by ocean, pivoting to markets in the United States and Canada. “We have always maintained a very strong customer base in North America,” explains Isaacs, “and during the pandemic this proved to be a very important strategy as there were fewer flights to Asia and ocean freight costs shot up while transit times increased and reliability dropped dramatically.”

“2022 was better in terms of availability of ocean freight equipment, but there were still delays and high costs. 2023 will not be a return to normal, but we hope to service Asia with ocean freight with rates that are more reasonable with fewer delays and faster transit times door to door,” predicts Isaacs.

One refrigerated container, with capacity for 3360 x 5kg kilogram boxes of cherries, is valued at anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 depending on the size of the fruit, the variety and the time of the season.

The Moon Festival is well-timed in 2023 for B.C. growers to harvest and pack premium cherries for transport and distribution in the two weeks leading up to the holiday.

In another development, export-facing commodity growers were happy to hear that on April 20, the Canadian government greenlighted a major new container terminal, the Roberts Bank Terminal 2 in Delta, BC. About 30 kilometres south of the central port, the expanded terminal will increase capacity by up to 60 per cent. The Port of Vancouver, already Canada’s largest port, processed 141.4 M metric tonnes of cargo in 2022. The numbers are staggering for raw resources such as prairie wheat, metallurgical coal, woodchips and potash/potassium-based fertilizer. These numbers dwarf the shipments of horticultural products. According to the Port of Vancouver’s 2022 Statistics Overview, released May 1, 2023, the movement of outbound horticultural products totalled 35,538 metric tonnes –down about nine per cent from the previous year.

The need for expedited processes for cold-refrigerated produce exports is evident.

The Roberts Bank Terminal 2 project has been in the works for more than a decade to accommodate the interests of